Our first spotlight series focuses on one of our oldest GroupTweet accounts, @Cabup. This account is comprised of over 400 London Taxi drivers using GroupTweet to communicate in real-time. Its essentially their very own dispatch system, and they send over 250 tweets a day.

Back in November 2011, the Greater London Authority wrote a great piece discussing how London Taxi Drivers are using GroupTweet. Check out the article HERE.

This type of account really demonstrates the power of the GroupTweet platform. Richard Cudlip is the founder of @Cabup and he explains why GroupTweet was the perfect fit:

Drivers on Twitter quickly started Tweeting about what was going on around town, where traffic was bad, which stations needed taxis etc, but not all drivers followed each other and therefore wouldn’t always see this information. So another account was set up, @CabbieUpdates (quickly reduced to @Cabup), so that drivers would only have to post information to that account & follow it, to see the information that all drivers were posting.

To enable this, we discovered a service called GroupTweet that allows you to DM your message to the @Cabup account and then sends the DM as a Tweet from @Cabup. What this account has become is nothing short of fantastic, over 400 drivers follow the account and there have been over 110,000 Tweets sent from the account. That’s 110,000 bits of information about where works is, traffic hotspots, drivers asking for help, drivers offering “going home jobs” to each other and much more.

This illustrates the power of GroupTweet. Without GroupTweet it would be nearly impossible for all 400 taxi drivers to all follow each other and keep up to speed with the conversation. However, GroupTweet enables all 400 drivers to post their messages to a single Twitter account and all the messages are on topic! Think of it like a reply all Twitter based message board.

To give you an idea how much these driver’s are benefiting from the service, here are some stats:

Since Inception, there have been over 150,000 Tweets sent from @Cabup

Over the last 30 days, there have been 20 drivers who have each sent over 100 updates.

Drivers send the most messages on Thursday and Friday, and the least on Saturday-Sunday.

The busiest Tweeting hours are from 17:00 – 1:00.

As you can see, this is an invaluable tool for the 400 members of this group. @Cabup’s founder Richard Cudlip also shared one of his favorite stories involving the service:

My favourite story about @Cabup involves me personally when I was stuck on the rank at South Kensington after my battery had gone flat. I’d phoned the RAC but also put a msg in @Cabup moaning about my luck, well within 15 minutes 2 drivers had come to my rescue beating the RAC hands down when it comes to response time. It is this sense of community that has grown up around TLC & Cabup, having access to a pool of drivers if something goes wrong, having a group of mates you can have dinner with and generally making the job a bit better.

We think Taxi Driver GroupTweets should be created in each and every city across the globe. Just be careful and don’t tweet while you drive!